Saturday, March 11, 2017

One Moon

This three o’clock morning I am looking at the full moon hiding round the corner of the condo castle as it slides down the western sky into the Gulf of Mexico. Looking back, and mindful of our story for Sunday, it’s the same moon, although now slightly more distant and therefore a mite smaller, that Terah saw as he left Ur and migrated to Haran. The one moon that Abram, later Abraham, saw years after as he, Sarai, Lot, and the people they had acquired in Haran headed out to claim the promise of יְהוָה֙ the Lord. Abram was seventy-five years old as his adventure with יְהוָה֙ began developing into close friendship. Except maybe David generations later, his friendship with Abraham seems to have been Adonai’s closest relationship with us ever.

We know nothing, which is nearly impossible for humans to face, but back in Ur people are said likely to have worshiped Nanna a moon god. Plus each family may have had their own household god such that upon moving, Terah and his family took their household god along with them. How and when יְהוָה֙ took up with them with an eye toward adoption, we don’t know; maybe while they were still in Ur of the Chaldeans; but even with gaps in certainty, it’s a great old story that likely was told and enjoyed many evenings around the campfire as Abram and family set out to mark Palestine as their land.

Apparently wealthy for his day, the story mentions almost in passing that as well as Abram, Lot, and Sarai, those embarking on the trip included the people that Abram had acquired in Haran. The rationalizers may insist this means friends and neighbors, but those PC folks who currently are busy obliterating CSA history, statues, street names and high school names from the Old South may want, when they are done down here, to take their censoring markers and scissors to the Bible and discredit slave-owning heroes. History being no good unless it is rendered acceptable to the victors.Also almost in passing, the old campfire story mentions that the land was already occupied by Palestinians, which doesn’t become significant until after Moses and the Exodus, when Joshua goes city to city with his killing fields, a primordial inverse final solution that, not panning out as conceived because the Promised Land was never totally occupied after all, to any extent historical, may be an origination of today’s permanent Middle Eastern irresolution involving the sleight of hand two-state naïveté, and/or single-state Israel with two classes of citizenry, residence and human rights. A founding tragedy for both Jews and Palestinians is that Palestine instead of Germany paid the price for the Holocaust: Palestinians were and remain displaced and concentrated while the Germans got off scot free all because in divvying up the northern hemisphere after WW2, the winners and therefore forcing decision-makers were Christian-worldview orientated in an era that totally discounted Islam, in which Muslim nations refused to concede. Thus we have — where we are now, including not only every death in the irresolvable MiddleEastern conflict but also, for us, 9/11. This is the Western denial that caused Mayor Guiliani* to reject Prince Alwaleed’s check. A star player, the U.S. has a narcissistic personality disorder when foreign policy comes to self-examination and placing blame. The present state, a state of perpetual concentration, may know no solution short of apocalyptic war a la Revelation 18:10 and Pat Frank’s dark novel Alas, Babylon. All somewhat historically, or at least in Heilsgeschichte, traceable to Genesis 11, Abraham, Joshua, and ultimately the buck stops at Himself יְהוָה֙ IDK. I don’t know. Like Sgt. Schwartz, and the German people from 1945 henceforth, I know nothing, nothing. I’m not even signing this morning’s blogpost.Addendum. While I don’t know of Ralph F. Wilson and do not subscribe to his Statement of Faith, I did enjoy his series piece on Abraham, which I came across while looking at the full moon and browsing this early morning. And the two maps are his.* http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/10/11/rec.giuliani.prince/

http://www.jesuswalk.com/abraham/0_intro.htmGenesis 11:31 - 12: 9(NRSV)31 Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife, and they went out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there. 32 The days of Terah were two hundred five years; and Terah died in Haran.The Call of Abram12 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. 5 Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, 6 Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. 8 From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. 9 And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.

About Me

Retired Episcopal priest writing and ruminating and musing lightly for self and friends as a therapy for recuperation after successful open heart surgery at Cleveland Clinic on Monday, January 24, 2011.